#false papers

That, in the end, is how I love the sea. I love it from across the street. I need distance, obstacles between me and what I want. I like bits and pieces of the beach...the way I like the promise of Paris more than Paris itself, a staggered view more than huge vistas. I need all these dilatory measures the way Matisse needed them when he painted in Nice. There are almost no paintings with the word “sea” in the works Matisse did in Nice between 1916 and 1930...most show a room leading to another room, which leads to yet another, until you reach a faraway window. Some of those paintings, however, depict a room that leads directly to French windows opening onto a balcony, in between the balusters of which finally appear what lies-- for me-- at the very core of these paintings: incidental patches of blue, caught almost inadvertently or as an afterthought by the painter, who seems to have merely dabbed a few strokes of paint between each post... his subject was always the sea. But staggered, deferred, delayed, distanced, recessed, almost serving as a vague background hastily sketched around a precisely executed balustrade and allegedly having no other purpose than to add color to what would have been a stifling scene in a room...I want to go to that room because I want to see the place from which Matisse did the one thing every artist is interested in doing with the sea: not to describe it, not even to evoke it, but to invoke it. (p31)

I come to Straus Park to remember Alexandria, albeit an unreal Alexandria, an Alexandria that does not exist, that I’ve invented or learned to cultivate in Rome as in Paris, so that in the end the Paris and the Rome I retrieve here are really the shadow of the shadow of Alexandria, versions of Alexandria, the remanence of Alexandria, infusing Straus Park itself now, reminding me of something that is not just elsewhere but that is perhaps more in me than it ever was out there, that is, after all, perhaps just me, a me that is no less a figment of time than this city is a figment of space. (p49)

On those evenings, as on those moments in life when our hull is cracked and we’re forced to molt everything we’ve got til we’re as naked as a newborn and begin the slow, difficult work of reinventing a new skin with the very little we’ve got left each time, I felt so exposed that.. I found that I could get attached to anything-- a thought, a habit, a song; everything I touched or read or so much as leaned my head against became dearer to me than was the person in that apartment whose lights at night were more beguiling and intractable than a light from a vanished star. (p127)

I may say that I am always, always caught between two points, one of which is always a metaphor of the other. But that’s not quite correct. I am not caught between two points. I am two points caught in the same spot. Correction: I am two points caught in different spots. This may explain why I am always fond of using the image, the figure, of two foci in an ellipse, or of the two banks of a river, or of the many strands in a cat’s cradle that always manage to reproduce generations of patterns with baffling regularity. The figure in all this is always the same: me tussling between two shadow centers. I have tried to give a flavor of this figure in many ways here: by showing that once I’m in Italy, I’d really be in New York; that when I’m in New York, I’m already in Italy... Traffic captures the bizarre nature of the psyche, where the dominant motion is one not so much of ambivalence as of perpetual oscillation. The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands. It is the traffic between places, and not the places themselves, that eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement, as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home. (p139)

This is how I always travel: not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. This, it occurs to me, is also how I live.

An exile is not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can't find another, who can't think of another.